The era of the disruptive mid-tier provider is here: meet Hexaware's CEO Keech

The services industry has already been redefined by the rapid emergence of intelligent automation and digital technology. This has created a massive headache for traditional service providers looking to protect existing clients who still pay them for humans to provide effort, when they should really be paying their provider to help them achieve business outcomes, based on results.

While many of the traditional providers are struggling to deal with this "revenue cannibalization", several of the middle-tier providers are bubbling up to take advantage of this opportunity. Net-net, they do not have a lot of "legacy business" to protect and have more flexibility to pick up clients which no longer want to get entrapped in a legacy FTE model. One such disruptor is Hexaware, which is reinventing itself as an automation-driven service provider with the appetite to take on and transform legacy engagements from its competitors, in addition to chasing brand new green-field opportunities of its own.

We caught up with the firm's energetic CEO R Srikrishna (aka "Keech") to shed some more light on what makes a firm like Hexaware tick, and a little bit about Keech himself, and how he has catapulted the firm into the spotlight over the past couple of years.